What a Development Team Can Teach You About Agile Digital Marketing

In this article, Sarah Fruy, Director of Online Marketing at Pantheon draws on her personal experience working with a development team and how she applied agile approaches to typical marketing tasks. Sarah describes different elements that make a development team efficient; then, she relates those elements to digital marketing professionals and provides actionable strategies for them to apply to their current marketing problems. Ultimately, Sarah explains why marketers should start adopting an agile digital marketing mindset to accomplish their goals.

From a distance, development and marketing teams might appear to have little in common. But if you take another look, a development team's methodology can easily translate into the inner workings of a marketing team's goals and needs. Take pair programming, for example. This generally known approach allows two programmers to work together at one station. While one team member writes the code, the other reviews each line for accuracy and bugs. Additionally, if one programmer gets stuck on a complex line of code, the other is there to offer ideas and get to a resolution faster.

Surprisingly, studies show that this approach only slows the process by 15 percent, and with a marginal reduction in speed comes a number of compelling advantages. The main benefit is a 15 percent decrease in the number of bugs in the code, which can save time down the road when it comes to proofing the finished product. Other advantages include the opportunity for knowledge sharing between developers and increased collaboration and interpersonal skills.

By now, you're probably wondering how a development team's approach has anything to do with common marketing woes. And the answer comes down to agility. I've found through working with my own development team that agile methods ease marketing workflows, allowing team members to be as efficient as possible.

For instance, I recently decided to try the pair programming concept when launching new website content. Our product marketing manager had a page she was ready to launch, so she and I sat down with a long checklist of items and QA'd the page together, sharing our best practices for how we review work and ensuring the page was properly set up. While this tactic took slightly longer, we both agreed the end result was well worth the additional investment. Consequently, agility found its purpose in our marketing efforts.

Elements of Efficiency

An agile approach that is often seen in development teams has a few elements that traditional marketers might not be familiar with. To start, a sprint and product backlog contributes to the efficiency of the scrum team. When put into practice at Pantheon, I regularly comb through marketing tasks to make sure the highest-value work floats to the top of the queue. Consequently, with clear priorities, our team knows exactly which task to tackle after it finishes each project.

A daily standup is also a pillar of development efficiency, complete with a review of what individuals did yesterday, what they hope to accomplish today, and what potential obstacles are standing in their way. However, when standups devolve into a tired process that takes the bare minimum of thought, they become much less effective. Instead, their goal should always be focused on constant improvement. Ultimately, this goal is representative of the agile methodology as a whole — while it's most commonly applied to development, it's just as effective at optimizing your marketing efforts.

How an Agile Approach Can Solve Your Most Pressing Marketing Problems

The traditional approach to marketing is laden with problems that weigh down teams and prevent them from achieving the results they're capable of. Fortunately, there's a solution. The following are three key barriers to marketing success, accompanied by how an agile approach can turn these everyday obstacles into opportunities:

1. Siloed Teams

Members of a marketing team frequently work in silos, devoting their attention to individual tasks or projects without input from other colleagues. This approach is particularly common because each individual is generally bringing his or her own specialty to the team. While the responsibilities of each person might be based on his or her core competencies, teams that function in this way miss out on collaboration that can increase the overall quality of work.

According to a survey from Salesforce, 86 percent of respondents cited a lack of collaboration as a leading cause of workplace failures. Development teams overcome this issue by conducting frequent peer reviews focused on code, and at Pantheon, we incorporate this peer review process into our marketing efforts when creating our blog content or launching new webpages and campaigns. Whenever possible, pinpoint areas in your project timeline to focus on peer reviews. In all likelihood, this agile perspective will highlight issues that often go unnoticed and weigh down your marketing efforts.

2. Tunnel Vision

Marketing teams can easily lose sight of what's in front of them because they're too zeroed in on a long-term marketing plan. While setting an annual or quarterly agenda is an effective way to align a team across various priorities and ensure tasks are completed in a timely manner, it also contributes to a set-it-and-forget-it mindset that leads teams to ignore immediate results.

With an agile approach, a marketing team is constantly testing new campaign ideas and iterating based on the results. This process allows team members to make smarter decisions in less time. Instead of determining campaign success quarterly or yearly, a marketing team acts like a development team and integrates testing and optimization as part of its regular workflow. The result is a competitive advantage that traditional marketing teams frequently struggle to secure.

3. Ineffective Reviews

Many marketing teams fail to perform the type of review that leads to improved campaigns. Sure, they might run through a deck and discuss the team's trajectory toward those annual or quarterly goals, but for the most part, they leave out important details that could increase efficiency and inform future projects. The consequences of this oversight can be dire.
Development teams, on the other hand, hold frequent retrospective meetings that go over the successes and failures of each project right after they've been completed. Steve Jobs called this process "connecting the dots," and it's easily applied to an agile marketing workflow. To do this, identify key issues that made conducting the campaign difficult, and then apply this information to future campaigns in order to support continuous improvements. Merely rushing through the review process — or, worst of all, skipping it entirely — defeats the purpose of having reviews in the first place.

Today, more marketers are leading strategic initiatives for their organizations, and it's no accident. Instead of relying on intuition, successful marketers create campaigns using data and testing that generate measurable results. To improve these results even more, marketers should focus on how development teams continue to evolve and grow by adopting an agile approach. Those who embrace the power of agility will transform their workflows and their marketing outcomes.